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Alumni Profiles

David Levine has always tread a fine line between academia and industry. He entered the ICS Ph.D. program at UCI in 1987 after working at The Aerospace Corporation on projects for the Department of Energy. Those included fuel-saving programs for cars and trucks and early electric and hybrid vehicles, ranging from on-board control systems to very detailed drivetrain simulations. As those programs were winding down, he looked for opportunities in software research. UCI was a natural fit, and Professor Richard Taylor’s

“Turbo Pascal was like a calling in high school”, remembers ISR alumnus Jason Robbins. “I knew that was what I wanted to do with my life: build tools like that so more people could write better software. I’m still working on it.”

When Owen O’Malley was picking graduate schools, he chose UC Irvine’s Information & Computer Science because of its leading-edge software group and strong ties to industry. In software, it is critical to understand your customer and their use cases. Doing research is very exciting, but it is critical to combine the theoretical with the experience of industrial professionals. At UCI, with the guidance of his advisor Prof. Debra J. Richardson, he explored many different topics that proved invaluable to him in his career including program analysis, graph algorithms, distributed computing, and software architectures.

“Has it really been fifteen years?!,” Rohit Khare exclaimed. “I first heard about Professor Richard Taylor’s unique research team at UC Irvine in the mid-90’s, from his students working at the World Wide Web Consortium — and that pretty much determined the course of my career ever since.”